Imagine a movie which is a thriller, something along the same lines as Fatal Attraction (1987). Imagine, however, that it is set at a school, with the lead roles being students in their final year of high school - so the Michael Douglas character is played by Jesse Bradford, and the Glenn Close character is played by Erika Christensen. Bradford's character Ben is a champion swimmer, who's looking to get into a good college on this basis. Ben has a lovely girlfriend named Amy (Shiri Appleby), and things are going, ahem, swimmingly, for him, until Madison shows up, and tempts him into a one-night stand in the deep end of the swimming pool.

And now, imagine, if you will, that the character of Madison, who falls for a swimming champion, and then becomes murderously obsessed with him, can not swim. This is the kind of ingenious screenplay with which you are dealing if you choose to see Swimfan.

Swimfan is directed by the Aussie creator of Tropfest, John Polson. Given the style of films that Polson is usually involved in (for want of a better word, arthouse), this movie is a little slicker than what I expected, and is aimed at a somewhat different audience (it'll probably appeal to fans of Cruel Intentions, for example). The cast is relatively unknown, but they do about as good a job as is possible with what is essentially a throw-away movie.

I'm not usually a big one for pointing out when a film's storyline is so obvious that it's not funny, but this film is so obvious that it's not funny. It's also not clever, nor is it exciting. Have all the movie ideas already been taken, meaning that in order to create new films, we must just re-do old ones slightly differently? And, if so, must we always include scenes where people chat to each other on some non-existent internet chat program, with a nickname that has numbers at the end, and then name the movie after that nickname? I guess, according to Swimfan, we must.

pearly gives this movie 5 out of 10.Review created on Tue 5 Aug 2003

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